Steve Pavlina announced in a blog post recently that he’s shutting down his forums. In his characteristic manner of talking a lot of fluff while not addressing anything substantive, he doesn’t say precisely why the forums are being closed.

I did a bit of research, and from looking through this and this thread, it seems like this is what basically happened:

2) Those moderators then PM’d some selected members of Steve’s forum and invited them to join the other forum. You might consider this to be spam. Personally, I’m not sure. However this is what a highly reputed member (now also banned) of Steve’s forum wrote:

I received an invitation and sent one shortly after PDforyou was founded. The invitations I knew of were supposed to essentially be a personal suggestion for who you’d like over there, not spam, quantity was definitely not the point. I visited it and posted for a while after I heard that some of the members that had stopped participating here had decided to give that a try, but after awhile I stopped participating because I found no interest in much of what was going on. I logged on a few times since to see what was up there.

It honestly didn’t occur to me that would be a problem here, any more than participating in any other forum would, or that inviting specific friends here to any other forum would. The exclusivity didn’t ever quite feel right, which was one of the reasons I left. I’m very sorry you feel hurt by this situation, Steve.

If its true that they only invited ‘friends’, and people they knew, then I don’t think it should be considered spam. If they sent PMs to strangers, then it would definitely be spam. But given that PDForYou.com is invite only, its likely that they only invited some people whom they knew well. Who knows.

3) Steve found about this, and got upset, in a fairly childish way. He decided to ban Angela and possibly some other members of the forum over this.

4) Someone made a thread asking why Angela was banned, all this came up, and presumably Steve took a lot of criticism there.

5) All this combined, with the fact that Steve doesn’t seem to want to moderate the forum, and he’s apparently upset that some people would want to join/promote another forum, has resulted in him shutting down this forum.

That’s what I can gather from looking through the forum posts on this topic. All of this also points to Steve’s very thin skin, and his lack of ability to take any criticism.

The only good thing to come out of this, is that perhaps there will be less of a cult following around him now, and less people might be falling for his quakeries like ‘intention manifestation, subjective reality’, and the ‘psychic readings’ of his ex wife. At least, there might be less of a group mentality and peer pressure to believe such nonsense.

I hope that at PdForYou.com, the traditions of censorship from Steve’s forum don’t continue, and free speech is allowed to freely discuss any topic without fear of being banned if the site owner doesn’t like what someone has to say.

Please share your comments and thoughts on why the forum was closed and whether it was a good or bad thing.

Disclaimer: Because of the rampant censorship at Steve’s forum and deleting of posts he doesn’t like, and the fact that he might decide to take his forum offline or change its URL, the links to the threads might go offline in future.

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